Kim McKay Clinical Psychologist

Kim McKay Clinical Psychologist Interest in adult and adolescents. Individual therapy
Couples and family therapy
Assessments
Maternal Mental Health
Tension Stress Release Exercises(TRE)

03/09/2026

I will be running a circle for moms in the first year, in the thick of it, we will unpack what you’re experiencing and how your steadiness is what your baby relies on to feel safe.

It’s run through Khaya-doc, kept affordable and will run for 4 evenings a week from 14 September. If you’re interested please email support@khaya-doc for more information and to sign up!

Come sit with us.

A labour of Love. Awesome to work with such incredible women, unpacking the metamorphosis of motherhood, mental health a...
06/08/2026

A labour of Love.

Awesome to work with such incredible women, unpacking the metamorphosis of motherhood, mental health and the village.

Hoping you will join us at the launch!

A reflection, for the clinicians who follow this account, and for anyone curious about what the work actually asks of th...
10/06/2026

A reflection, for the clinicians who follow this account, and for anyone curious about what the work actually asks of the person doing it.

Therapy is one of the few professions where the practitioner is the instrument. There is no tool between you and the work. The capacity to be present, to attune, to hold formulation while staying responsive, to co-regulate without losing your own ground, this is the entire intervention. Which means the clinician’s state, week after week, is the limiting factor on what the work can be.

The literature on therapist burnout (Simionato & Simpson, 2018, systematic review) consistently identifies workload, emotional demand, and the administrative burden of private practice as primary drivers: not, notably, difficult clients or compassion fatigue in the way the lay framing suggests. The structural conditions of the work matter more than the content of it.

If you are a clinician reading this and recognising yourself, you are not failing at the work. You are doing it.

If you are someone considering therapy and this gives you a window into what your psychologist is holding, that’s also useful. The work is worth what it costs, on both sides of the room.

*Composite reflection. Not specific to any one practice.

08/05/2026

Becoming a mother changes you. Not just your routine, you. The way you think, what you grieve, how you love, who you are in the quiet moments.

There’s a word for it: matrescence.
The developmental transition into motherhood. Like adolescence, but somehow we don’t talk about it.

So we’re going to.

Join us on Wednesday 13 May at 19:00 for an Instagram Live. A real conversation about what no one tells you about becoming a mother. The mental load. The identity shift. The grief and the joy. The difference between normal hard and needs support.
The village we don’t have but desperately need.

Bring your questions. Bring a friend. Bring the things you’ve been carrying.
Save the date, we’ll see you there.
⸻
— mom, wife, entrepreneur
— Kim McKay-Motsepe, Clinical Psychologist

Tomorrow on Elevated with Jenna-Leigh Bilong on Radio Pulpit.I sat down with Jenna-Leigh to talk about the path that bro...
07/05/2026

Tomorrow on Elevated with Jenna-Leigh Bilong on Radio Pulpit.

I sat down with Jenna-Leigh to talk about the path that brought me into clinical psychology, and the work that continues to shape me: matrescence, maternal mental health, and the often unspoken complexity of family and stepfamily life.

We spoke about why becoming a mother is a developmental transition in its own right, why so many women feel unseen inside it, and what it really takes to hold a family system together when it includes more than one household, more than one history, and more than one kind of love.

Tune in 🎧
📻 Friday, 11:00 (CAT) | Repeat Sunday 19:00
657AM • DStv 882 • OVHD 607
Livestream: radiopulpit.co.za

I have sat with so many mothers who arrive in my consulting room afraid of their own anger.Not the everyday irritation. ...
30/04/2026

I have sat with so many mothers who arrive in my consulting room afraid of their own anger.

Not the everyday irritation. The other kind. The one that takes them by surprise. The one they cannot find language for, because the language we have for mothers does not include rage.

So they carry it in private. They tell themselves something is wrong with them. They Google at 2am. They wonder if they are the version of their own mother they swore they would not become.

Here is what I want every one of those women to know: your rage is not the diagnosis. It is the data.

Rozsika Parker spent two decades arguing this in the clinical literature, and I think about her work often. The mothers who do the deepest psychological work are not the ones who never feel ambivalence. They are the ones who can bear it without splitting it off, without acting it out, without collapsing into shame about it.

The piece I keep returning to in my own thinking and the piece I do not think we name enough, is that maternal rage is so often about a self that has nowhere to go. The professional self. The creative self. The one who used to make things. She doesn’t disappear when you become a mother. She gets pushed underground. And buried things tend to come back up sideways.

That is a different conversation than “mom rage.” It is a conversation about what happens to a woman’s generativity when every bit of it is conscripted into care.

If this lands somewhere in you…I would love to know what you are carrying that no one is helping you carry.

Good therapy resists a neat aesthetic for clinical reasons, not stylistic ones.A well-held container is part of the work...
24/04/2026

Good therapy resists a neat aesthetic for clinical reasons, not stylistic ones.

A well-held container is part of the work, a predictable frame, a therapist who does not perform, a space that holds without demanding attention. These are the conditions under which a person can say the thing they have not said anywhere else.

Much of what is packaged as therapy online is not therapy. It is commentary about therapy, insights borrowed from therapy, or therapeutic language repurposed as content. That has its place.

But the work itself is slower, quieter, and often uncomfortable for both people in the room for reasons that are hard to put in one post.

If you are in therapy and it feels ordinary at times, even uneventful, that is often the work happening, not a sign that it isn’t.

There is a particular kind of grief in early motherhood that almost no one names out loud.It is not postnatal depression...
22/04/2026

There is a particular kind of grief in early motherhood that almost no one names out loud.

It is not postnatal depression. It is not regret. It is not a signal that something has gone wrong.

It is the quiet, disorienting mourning of the woman you were before, her spontaneity, her sleep, her body, her career rhythm, the shape of her partnership. She is gone, and the culture did not hand you a script for grieving her.

The psychoanalyst Rozsika Parker called this maternal ambivalence, the co-existence of love and loss inside the same mother. The family therapist Pauline Boss called it ambiguous loss, a loss without ritual, without witness, without a name.

In matrescence, grief and love are not opposites. They travel together.

If you are in this, you are not failing. You are in a passage that deserves to be named. 🤎

If the grief is unrelenting, flat, or frightening, please reach out 📍SADAG’s toll-free line is 0800 21 22 23, and PNDSA is available via SMS on 082 882 0072.

20/04/2026

The word narcissist is doing a lot of work online right now. When you’ve grown up with a parent who couldn’t tolerate your voice, finally having a name for it feels like oxygen.

But as a clinical psychologist who works relationally, I want to offer something more useful than a label.

What you’re describing isn’t a personality. It’s a pattern.
It starts with a parent whose internal stability is fragile. Not evil. Fragile. They need the people closest to them to steady that, to reflect them as good, important, in control. Small children do this beautifully, because they’re dependent and adoring.

The rupture comes when the child grows a self. Opinions. Refusals. A voice. For a parent whose ground depends on being mirrored, individuation isn’t experienced as development, it’s experienced as threat.
So the parent tightens. The child’s voice gets renamed as disrespect, their difference as betrayal. The child adapts, shrinks, performs, manages the mood. Which means the child is now holding up the pattern too. Not because they’re complicit. Because that’s what children do inside unsafe systems.

This is why the label stops being useful. It locates the whole problem in one person, so the only way out is for that person to change. They usually don’t. But the pattern can.

Personalities are sticky. Patterns are not. The moment one person stops playing their role, the system has to reorganise.

So the question isn’t what is he. It’s what is the pattern, what is it protecting, and what is my part in holding it now?
That’s where things shift.

Hi, I’m Kim.Clinical psychologist by training, mother by daily apprenticeship, and someone who genuinely believes champa...
17/04/2026

Hi, I’m Kim.

Clinical psychologist by training, mother by daily apprenticeship, and someone who genuinely believes champagne with your girlfriends counts as nervous system regulation.

For those of you who are new here (welcome), a reintroduction:

I’m a HPCSA-registered Clinical Psychologist with nine years in private practice across Lynnwood Glen and Rooihuiskraal. My work is systemic and relational. I’m less interested in what’s “wrong” with you, and more interested in the patterns you’re caught in and what’s keeping them alive. I see individuals, couples, and families, and I do forensic assessments in family matters (care and contact, relocation, best interests of the child). I also work with organisations on things like psychological fitness, leadership profiling, and building teams that can actually stay regulated under pressure.

Matrescence is close to my heart, clinically and personally. I write and speak about it because the shift into motherhood is one of the most under-named developmental transitions in a woman’s life, and most of us are handed a baby and no language for what’s happening to us.

Off the clock: I’m a wife and a mom. I love a long table with good wine and better conversation. I recharge in nature. And I’m learning, slowly, that modelling rest for my children is more useful than modelling productivity.

Glad you’re here. 🤍

Address

Midstream Hill Medical Centre
Centurion
0157

Opening Hours

Monday 09:00 - 17:00
Tuesday 09:00 - 17:00
Wednesday 09:00 - 17:00
Thursday 09:00 - 17:00
Friday 09:00 - 16:00
Saturday 09:00 - 12:00

Telephone

+27120720032

Website

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